Traditional file system backup approaches may use a file system walk to enumerate the files and then read and transfer each file as needed to backup storage. Incremental backup operations reduce overhead associated with the file system walk by only processing files created and/or modified since a last backup operation. Further increases in backup efficiency have been achieved using synthetic full backup approaches which create synthetic full backups by combining previous full backups with incremental changes. In certain cases, backup operations can be triggered manually and given a specific file list to process thereby avoiding the file system walk, but that list still has to be generated externally.
Block-based approaches eliminate the need for a file system walk by tracking block-level changes to a volume. Stored data representing the block-level changes may be used to identify and backup the changed blocks in an incremental backup operation. Since data identifying changed blocks on the volume is ready at any point in time, there is no need for additional operations to generate a list of what blocks need to be saved. Block-based backup operations are typically scheduled using a central backup server (e.g., using scheduler built in to backup server software), scheduled manually using third-party schedulers, and/or initiated manually (e.g., by an end user). In each case, the recovery point objective (RPO) may be based on a predetermined schedule and user intervention.